GENERAL NEWS

“No one wants to see a pop-up in the middle of their program they love saying ‘Buy this!'” he said. “The primary screen is not the way to drive the commerce.” Second-screen marketing represents “a way to augment the experience without impacting the experience.” American Express is dabbling in the space to see if it can associate itself with consumers making purchases based on what they see in their favorite TV programs, having signed deals in the last few weeks with both News Corp.’s Fox and Comcast’s NBC Universal…Advertisers “are looking for more interaction” when they do deals that tie them to specific programs, said Jean Rossi, president of News Corp.

American Express is taking another step toward the new world of television that is always on, making a deal with BrightLine for a yearlong campaign centered on an interactive branded channel…The branded channel is providing viewers content that includes video clips, offers, games and information about American Express cards and promotions like Small Business Saturday…American Express is among a growing number of giant marketers exploring the ins and outs of interactive television, which appeals to them because ads can be directed at an audience and the results — or lack thereof — measured.

Is the Live Web bigger than TV? Absolutely. First off, the continued progression of TV Everywhere, whereby authenticated subscribers to cable or satellite services have access to their cable video content on most connected devices, is going to result in TV becoming a virtual subset of the Live Web. This will happen within the next two years…Understanding the Live Web would allows publishers to create digital prime time for their content, create an outlet for content that can’t find a place in their traditional programming wheel, and create a direct and recurring connection with their users instead of leaving the discovery of their content to search.

And then it popped up. Right there on Twitter, for all of us wannabe leprechaun’s to see. Someone, maybe Notre Dame, maybe a vendor, but someone with their wits about them somehow owned the top of Twitter and featured Notre Dame gear…While Kirk Herbstreit and Brent Musberger were readying their post-game analysis, somebody was already on it preparing to take millions of dollars of orders. That is the power of #socialtv. That is the power of real-time marketing. That is realizing a serious ROI on Twitter…People are spending tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on commercials and completely missing the boat on how a simple social media campaign executed in real-time can reap some serious benefits. Both in actual cash and affinity.

Well, my killer team and I are hard at work tweaking the interface, and we don’t want to reveal too much quite yet, but basically SocialSocializing, as we’ve named our product, will re-revolutionize the social-media revolution in a revolutionary new fashion that re-engages consumer engagement engagingly. And we’re dong it by getting back to basics.

The iPad mini is the perfect companion to your TV. It is the remote control of the future. At $329, Apple is going to sell a boatloads of them this Christmas…88% of iPad owners use it in front of the TV. People in the US spend almost five hours a day watching TV (ouch ;-) It is still our favorite pastime, by far. All of a sudden, it is possible to talk with your friends, who are watching TV at the same time. It is called Social TV.

In some ways, the impact Social Media could have might be more important to movie audiences than TV. Because while a TV show that starts off with slow ratings is still going to hit every possible TV screen until its completely pulled, a movie with slow box office will usually shrink its footprint, meaning the chances of finding a slow-growing movie gem is harder. Positive social sentiment from early screenings — rather than relying on critics and first-week box office — could embolden theaters and distributors to give a movie time to grow. Or vice versa.

But how can social help? Madati told Mashable reporter Zoe Fox that social is critical for content producers to tap into the power of friends and the influence they have on each other. Think about when you want to see a new TV show or movie — do you ask friends first if they’ve seen it and liked it? Madati said social amplifies the opportunity there for content producers and entertainment brands. Social networks like Facebook can connect people to share their thoughts on a new piece of entertainment.

However, the current Smart TV market doesn’t look very smart, according to Informa Telecoms & Media’s latest Smart TV forecasts. It seems a large proportion of Smart TVs are used as dumb TVs, and they go out of date too quickly to act as “digital hubs”…Google launched Google TV two years ago in conjunction with Sony and Logitech, but it flopped. However, the system is based on Google Android, Google Chrome, and the Google Play store, so the company is likely to persist even in the face of market indifference. In the long term, Smart TV is likely to provide the opportunity for Google to sell more of its search advertising, apps and content, and it’s the TV manufacturers who are carrying most of the financial risk.

To non-insiders, YouTube networks can be one or all of the following: an ad sales team, a promotional marketing service, a production studio, a talent management agency, and/or a laison between YouTube partners and the notoriously hard-to-get-ahold-of YouTube reps. Think of a third-party YouTube network as a type of Web video business incubator with millions in funding (depending on the network) and all the right (presumably) connections to make you a big Web star. In return for all these wonderful things, the YouTube network takes a cut of your profits. Sometimes that cut can be more than half of what you earn.

But no one really likes to have a keyboard on their sofa, and search is about entering words. And it’s irritating to type out a word letter by letter using a remote control or, as I have to do with my Xbox, game controller (though voice and gesture control are options for Kinect-emabled Xboxes). Which is where voice search comes in. Want a certain channel? Just say the word–literally. The precious, boring minutes I’ve wasted flipping channels in search of AMC? No more. You can also do weirdly specific searches with Google TV’s new incarnation: “movies with Jeff Bridges,” say, turns up just that. Asking a question about how to body paint yourself will turn up a YouTube instructional video…

RESEARCH

For example, more consumers watch TV, and indeed, by eMarketer’s calculations, watch more of it, but those larger audiences are dispersed across multiple screens, or stream TV content to their PCs and smart devices. With rare exception, the mass audience accustomed to appointment viewing is long gone.

Is the tablet ready to move from being the second screen to the primary screen? It might be, according to the Consumer Electronics Asssociation’s senior researcher, who noted that tablets and smartphones were the top selling electronic devices this holiday weekend.

Consumers in the U.S. and U.K. are changing the way they view TV and video content by increasingly taking control of how, when, and where they view it, according to a new survey released today by Accenture (NYSE: ACN). About half (49 percent) of consumers surveyed in Accenture’s Pulse of Media Consumer Survey are viewing over-the-top (OTT) video through a broadband connection on their TVs (50 percent in the U.S. and 48 percent in the U.K.) in addition to the content they traditionally watch via cable or satellite…“We are seeing a seismic shift in consumer viewing habits,” said Robin Murdoch, a managing director in Accenture’s Media & Entertainment industry group. “The connected consumer is now comfortable viewing TV shows and video on a variety of screens, as well as sharing opinions of that content via social channels or recommendation engines.”… Younger consumers are also more likely to discover new content through social networks as opposed to learning about it through commercials or programming guides.

SHOW & NETWORKS

Bravo on Monday night will debut Play Live, a social TV experience that allows viewers to respond to on-air polls and see real-time results at the bottom of their televisions…Play Live will be accessible — starting during the Nov. 26 episode of talk show Watch What Happens Live at 11 p.m. ET — on mobile phones, tablets and desktops as well as through the Bravo Now app.

The service is also meant to serve as a revenue driver, as advertisers can serve up polls or questions that may tie into a product, or offer a coupon as the relevant product or service is featured on TV.

That’s because “Defiance” isn’t just a TV show. It’s also a massively multiplayer online videogame developed through a joint venture with San Francisco-based Trion Worlds. With their long product cycles and multiple revenue streams, MMOs, as they’re called, can be fantastically lucrative… What works as a game doesn’t necessarily work as a show and vice versa, making true cross-platform hits rare. “You generally have a licensee and a licensor, and whoever the licensee is has to make a lot of compromises,” says Nick Beliaeff, Trion’s senior vice president of development…“we realized that we really did need to create something from scratch together — to cocreate something that was designed to live on both of these platforms, as opposed to retrofitting something.”… As TVs, computers and game consoles increasingly adopt one another’s features, with everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft striving to make the “one screen to rule them all,” the idea of a story that can be experienced both passively and interactively comes to look less novel than native.

“I started tweeting about Community right after the third season hiatus was announced, and pretty quickly started interacting with other fans, and eventually with the cast and writers, all of whom I followed,” she told Lost Remote. “Tumblr came a bit later- basically, I use it for the same reasons a lot of fans do: to connect with each other, and the people that work on our favorite show,” she added. “Over time, as I became more active in the various fan campaigns, I also used the sites to spread the word about things like fan polls, gifts for the cast and writers, and plans for getting trending topics during Community episodes.”

Troika, a brand consultancy and creative agency has been working with The CW since it’s inception in 2006 to help keep this demo entertained through strategic branding. This TV season they’ve launched a major rebrand for The CW, which they describe as “branding in the cracks,” more specifically, “finding new areas and platforms for the brand to be expressed.”

TWITTER

Confirmation came earlier this month that former News Corp president and chief operating officer Peter Chernin has joined the board of Twitter…What he brings to Twitter is undoubtedly what the tech company so desperately craves – ever closer relations with the worlds of traditional media and advertising – but this isn’t something new…Chernin’s more recent addition is merely the latest step on Twitter’s path towards becoming something that TV has itself long aspired to be: a fully interactive broadcast platform with which the audience can be as engaged or as passive as they wish.

“It took three years, two months and one day for the first billion tweets to be sent. From the time the company started in 2006 to mid-2009 three years, two months and one day for the first billion tweets to be sent. It has a nice rhythm that it was three, two, one. It probably wasn’t exactly one day, but we like to say that; so it’s three, two, one,” he said. “We now send a billion tweets every two and a half days. So the volume, the noise level has increased dramatically.”

If you watched NBC’s The Voice last week, the closing song was “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” — not because the producers thought it was the best way to end the broadcast, but because Twitter diehards like ♥Michelle♥ wanted it…For all the commentary about DVR killing live TV, Twitter has inadvertently made live TV relevant again.

But apart from those headline numbers, and some history about Costolo’s experiences at the University of Michigan, much of the hour-long talk (which is embedded below) was devoted to how the Twitter CEO believes that the service has reshaped and disrupted media. Ever since the invention of the printing press, he said, we have had what amounts to broadcast media of one kind or another: it is one-way, and while it achieves broad distribution, it loses some of the benefits of the original town square or what the Greeks called the “Agora,” where townspeople shared the news of the day…In a nutshell, that’s what the Twitter CEO says his network provides now: a way of injecting the real-time, multi-directional and unfiltered nature of the town square back into the media. And the best part, Costolo says, is that while most new technologies are disruptive to traditional forms of media — in the sense that they disintermediate them — Twitter is actually complementary to mainstream sources of media such as television.

“We are no longer alone when watching the TV. We have the opportunity to connect with people all over the world watching the same programme at the same time,” Biddle said. During peak times 40% of all tweets are about TV shows, he added, with sports, and football in particular, driving TV Tweets. According to Biddle, 71% of people who saw a social media impression about a TV programme went on to watch it, while 31% continued to watch a TV show because of its social media impression. In this sense, Twitter could act as a TV guide, said Bidden, describing TV hashtags as “the ultimate bat signal”.

APPS & SERVICES

The announcement marks the marriage of two social TV titans – GetGlue, which has previously focused on sharing and discovery, and Viggle, known for its audio recognition technology and ability to extend the rewards experience beyond just programming. Together, GetGlue and Viggle now boast 5 million users. The merger is a clear power-move for both brands, which stand to benefit from the combined technologies and talent of each platform. This is good news for marketers, who now may be able to consolidate their social TV efforts and potentially reach more diverse and robust network of users.

With the addition of Zeebox in the U.S. market — and its partnership with Comcast — the race to scale has taken on new significance. Not to mention, Twitter is showing a concerted interest in growing its second screen features, and Yahoo-IntoNow-ABCNews is always a combination to watch. The Viggle-GetGlue acquisition certainly puts them in a strong position, especially when you consider the likelihood that Viggle’s reward system will roll out on GetGlue.

To me it shows the beginning of a consolidation of great technologies, services and talent that will enable the engagement, scale and reach that marketers need to budget for Social TV spend…..in fact this deal will enable the two companies to reach almost 5 million registered users, a number that is sure to grow very fast. In addition the combination of discovery and loyalty make the new company a powerhouse that will provide a great platform for users and solutions for advertisers…..and don’t forget the data. The realtime analysis of user data will help to build more quickly, even better applications and solutions moving forward.

Peel is rolling out its social programming guide in 21 European and Asian countries this week, allowing users of select Samsung Android tablets to find TV shows they want and change the channel with the device’s integrated IR blaster. Samsung is preloading the Peel app onto its Galaxy Tab and Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets, with plans to roll out TV guides in more than 50 countries by early 2013. The Mountain View-based startup hopes that the partnership with Samsung will lead to millions of additional users over the holiday season…Ellis told me that he doesn’t see that much overlap between apps like GetGlue and Peel, in part because of Peel’s strong focus on remote control capabilities. In the end, changing the channel matters more to users than checking into a show, he said. “The core proposition of social TV is secondary to the user,” he said, adding: “For us, control is a key part of the experience.”

GAMING

Changing tastes and technology have called into question the economics of traditional game consoles, whether from Nintendo or Microsoft, maker of the Xbox. Nintendo recently posted the first loss in its era as a video games company, a prospect that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. And while game consoles aren’t going away, analysts are skeptical that the business will regain its former stature soon. All of which makes Nintendo’s next move, and what is happening here, so crucial…THE Wii U is a recognition that the living room is no longer the province of a single screen. More people, particularly the young, now watch TV with a smartphone or tablet in hand, the better to tweet a touchdown or update their Facebook status during a commercial. The Wii U looks like a mash-up of an iPad and a traditional console, with a touch screen embedded in the middle…Starting in December, people will also be able to use the GamePad as a remote control to set recordings and change channels on their cable and satellite TV services.

INTERNATIONAL

TV networks in the US should not only be looking at this large and impressive entertainment company to see what the hottest new programming will be. The social TV executives within Keshet have proven how important it is to have an app and startup work well with the network’s brand and content. They’ve also proven how successful they can be when keeping developers and creative in-house. Instagram will be one of the biggest social TV platforms of the next year and Keshet has shown how using photos creatively can also be a great opportunity to partner with major press.

Television shows were the most talked about branded entities on Facebook in October indicating that social TV efforts have taken hold on the social network. Collectively the top 20 TV show pages for programs aired on Australian screens commanded around 8.5 million fans, more than 4 million ahead of nearest rival – the snackfoods industry.